Volume 1 – May 2011

With 15 years of software development and eight years of Agile practice under his belt, Craig Smith is an experienced and vocal advocate of the Agile methodology. He has regularly spoken at both the global and Australian Agile conferences, and currently spends his days as an Agile Coach at Suncorp’s Agile Academy.

Craig is a Certiﬁed Scrum Master, a member of the Scrum Alliance and Agile Alliance, an advisor to Agile Australia, and will be speaking at Agile Australia 2011.

My a-ha moment was in the days before many folks were even calling it Agile in 2001 – 2002. I worked on a project to write a lending application written in Java where we overtook a small meeting room, started writing tasks and designs on a whiteboard, split designing screens down via CRUD and core functionality and we paired and worked as a team to get things done. I could never go back after that. What has been your greatest challenge when introducing Agile to an organisation?

How did you overcome it?

In the early days it was trying to get people to take you seriously, as not delivering reams of documentation at the start of a project was seen like being a cowboy yet we were delivering faster than the teams around us. It felt much like working in a bubble because when we went outside our team environment we had to fall back to the waterfall processes used by the rest of the organisation. When Jeff Smith joined Suncorp, it was refreshing that someone in higher management had similar views, and since that point it has been a challenge to ﬁ nd approaches to make our IT teams (and now the entire organisation) to work more effectively.

What is your favourite Agile-related quote?

I am always having to remind people that “our job is not to do quality Agile, it is to deliver quality software or solutions”. We just use Agile values, principles and practices to help us do that. I am quite concerned how much the term Agile is overloaded or used as an excuse by many people now, so have started a movement to come up with a new label, and joked we should call it “raccoon”. (in hindsight I should have come up with a better name!)

What is the strangest situation you’ve applied an Agile principle to?

It’s amazing how many situations the core practices of stand-ups, retrospectives and Big Visual Charts are applicable to. I ﬁ nd it more amazing that when getting together to plan work with other Agile coaches or working on different Agile conferences, how often I have to remind people to visualise their ﬂ ow or do a reﬂ ection on progress.

If you could have a total career change, what would you be?

I never set out to work directly in IT, as I did a dual IT – librarianship degree at university. Part of me still wants to tick that box at some stage. But if I could ﬁ nd a job that I had the skills for that related to my love of motorsport, that would be awesome.

What is your favourite thing on your desk right now?

I don’t have a desk, so I live out of a backpack (one of my colleagues calls me “the turtle” because I carry my desk around). So when I do ﬁ nd a real desk, a power pack is usually pretty good. As for the cool stuff, I have a Spongebob Squarepants and a bunch of Simpsons characters on my desk at home!

Volume 2- September 2011

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the ‘Agile Manifesto’. This historic document was the culmination of the ideas of 17 passionate guys who got together on a mountain outside of Salt Lake City with the aim of focussing on delivering quality software rather than following mundane process.

This document was not the invention of Agile, as approaches like XP and Scrum were already around at this point, but it was the document that gave us the label ‘Agile’.

In the years since, we have seen the rise and rise of the adoption of Agile methods. However, while its core values and principles have remained the same, many new and improved practices have evolved.

We saw this in June this year when we held the third annual Agile Australia conference in Sydney. It was full of buzz and enthusiasm from the 700-plus attendees and it brought home to me what I appreciate most about being part of the Agile community. The fact that everybody – both your friends and competitors – are willing to share their experiences, good or bad, is something that I am sure would not have happened ten years ago.

On the flipside, one of the criticisms I have heard of late, is that there is no “WOW” in the Agile community anymore.

This got me questioning. Where has all the “WOW” gone?

I think in part, Agile is now seen as having well and truly crossed the chasm into mainstream. However, have we gone so far that have we have actually jumped the shark?

Judging by what I have seen at this and other recent Agile conferences, there is in fact “WOW” happening everywhere. You just have to notice and appreciate it.

These range from small examples like the different ways that people tackle retrospectives or organise their iteration planning, right through to innovative approaches to testing and deployment. We need to bring these innovations out of the shadows and shine a light on them, and not be too quick to dismiss them.

My thoughts are that we need to make sure that people who are still on their Agile journey have some basic practices and approaches to build their Agile foundation – which is a huge “WOW” on its own. For the rest of us who have made the leap, we need to remember the twelfth Agile Manifesto principle: “

At regular intervals, the team reﬂ ects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.”

In other words, we need to continually adjust and share our findings, and every now and then we might just come up with a “WOW” moment. That’s how practices like user stories and test driven development were invented.

My challenge to you, reader, is what is your ‘WOW’? Sharing our experiences, good and bad, is what makes the Agile community great. We need you to share your war stories and your improvements on existing processes and practices (and if you do, we welcome you to share it at the Agile Australia 2012 conference!)

To paraphrase Martin Fowler in his closing keynote at Agile Australia 2011: If you say Agile is no longer relevant, then essentially you are saying you are happy to go back to the ways of the past. If you have truly used Agile in your organisation or team, then you would agree there is no going back – and that is the greatest WOW of all.

Craig Smith is an Agile Coach at Suncorp and an advisor to the Agile Australia Conference.

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My presentation from Agile 2011 that I delivered with Greg Smith called “Agile 2.0: Rebooting a Raccoon in an Imperfect World” is available on Slideshare.

On this 10th anniversary of agile, our community is struggling to address the issue of how to take experienced agile practitioners to the next level, while still providing training and tools to support those who are beginning their journey. With the “agile” word getting so overloaded, the challenge is to continually innovate without assigning labels. In this talk we will discuss how to use the best of traditional, lean and agile methods to suit any team and showcase numerous patterns that demonstrate the best process to use is often a mixture of traditional practices and new innovations.

Some of the comments on Twitter included:

@teradee: watching @smithcdau speak on “rebooting the racoon. Craig has this stuff nailed. A bright spot in our community #agile2011

@teradee: Listening to @smithcdau talk a on the Oath of Non-Allegiance via @TotherAlistair Thinking this needs more shine #agile2011

@theagilepirate: Look up the manifesto manifesto – we have enough manifestos Kumquat, raccoon is a community #agile2011

@codingbynumbers: @smithcdau gives birth to #racoon at #Agile2011 (but we know it was conceived on @codingbynumbers)! http://t.co/CyvgOer

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My presentation from Agile 2011 that I delivered with Adrian Smith called “The Speed To Cool: Agile Testing and Building Quality In” is available on Slideshare.

Ensuring that the approach to testing and quality is understood and appropriately valued in an agile world can be a struggle for many organisations, especially when resources are limited and our customers are expecting business value in a timely manner. In this session we will define what quality means and share a number of tools for measuring it, discuss approaches to improving the skills, empowerment and role of testing in the organisation and share why testing is the coolest role on the team and why it is everyones responsibility.

Some of the comments on Twitter included:

@BrianGress: We tend to test only what we can see. #agile2011 @adrianlsmith

@tonyrockyhorror: @smithcdau Speed to Cool was best talk I’ve seen all week. It will take a mighty effort to top it. #agile2011

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The final day of Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City was keynote day but not before a couple of announcements. Next years conference will be organised by Mitch Lacey and held in Grapevine, Texas and a number of presentations were videoed (including one of my talks) and will be available over time on the Agile Alliance website.

Finally it was officially announced that my good friend and colleague Shane Hastie had been elected to the board of the Agile Alliance (a first for our little area of the world!). Here are my notes from the keynotes:

there are two mindsets – fixed and agile – determines everything we do – determines goals, reactions to failure, belief about effort and strategy, attitudes towards others successes

we can continue to grow, you can’t measure someones potential with an IQ test

belief about yourself affects belief about others – we are hardwired to judge and stereotype others, fixed mindsets do it on very little evidence, agile mindset still does it but are less positive/negative

bright little girls are typically praised constantly

bright little boys are typically criticized or reprimanded

organisations have a mindset as well

Enron had a fixed mindset to hire the best talent – “rank and yank” – only keep the best

Southwest are about people not planes – don’t hire for IQ, but for attitude and learning

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Day 4 at Agile 2011 brought a full day sessions full day of sessions followed by the conference dinner. For the first session I used the law of two feet and landed in three different sessions.

Stages of Practice: the Agile Tech Tree

Arlo Belshee and James Shore led this hands on session to build a technical tree of agile practices. I didn’t stay for long, but I was interested in the output, which I found hanging on the walls later in the day.

delight is happiness, joy, customer success – everybody has a story or understands this concept

identify your project that you wish to delight – who is your customer?

what do customers say they want? – warning! they don’t always know eg. New Coke

what is it that core customers might not like about your product? eg .why they made the Nespresso machine because people did not like cleaning up, need to get inside their head to understand what you need to change

Agile From the Top Down: Executives Practicing Agile

Jon Stahl delivered this session, and I wish I had been there for this one all the way through as his presentations are always entertaining and informative. His slides are available here.

get HR to create their own room to map the organisation and look for patterns – finding the truth isn’t simple but putting stuff on walls creates conversation

create a tool wall – who cares what tool you use, as long as you are adding value

get the practice vocabulary up on the wall – matched with a booklet with more detail

when tracking practices move away from traffic lights and use smiley faces to track how people are feeling – don’t care about if they are doing stand ups but how are they working for them – good way to figure out where to send coaches, where the frowns are

transparent leadership – post and show your people what roadblocks you are working on

everybody wakes up everyday thinking they are doing the best thing they can – as a business the executives need to check each other to make sure they are working on the most important thing and allow each other to question

Limited Red – calculates the probability of Cucumber failure to improve the way we work – found features that never fail – just keep them in nightly build – means a long build usually fails very quickly

use JMeter to check everything is up like a tracer bullet – eg. a row has appeared in a table

got 8 hour build down to 20 minutes by distributing over 24 EC2 nodes – but think we were solving the wrong problem

slice up the architecture and have thin tests to test them

Spork – helps to speed up the start up time of an application – hard to know whether to reload and it adds a lot of overload at the protocol layer, so almost as efficient to run the tests

people have core responsibilities but we all meld in our roles to be one team and deliver

I enjoyed this session, particularly as I read about Joseph’s company in Specification By Example. I am excited about the prospect of a tool such as Limited Red as well.

Telling Better Stories with User Story Mapping

Jeff Patton led this session to a packed room that included a live appearance from his children! His slides are available here.

Finally, Jeff has a User Story Mapping book in the pipeline which looks really interesting. I have had the pleasure of meeting Jeff a few times and always enjoy his presentation and learnings, and I am keen to give these learnings a go in my next storycard workshop.

cadence alone is not enough – worst nightmare is not the facts but the false sense of security that you are going to deliver

slowest component drags the train – if you have a VP of system integration you are already screwed

make sprints the same length – two weeks is a good cadence, three weeks is too long, you can’t figure out when you should start testing

have regular system wide integration – use PSI (potentially shippable increment) to ensure you have a product, use hardening sprints for the things you can’t do in a normal sprint and let the team catch up

release train process – when you have an asset that adds customer value, ship it or ensure you have a asset that you could ship – it could save you with large maintenance renewals

pacemaker is release planning – need a full day or two for release planning – if you can’t spare that then plan badly – also gives us full alignment, a good point to get the architects involved because at this point you can make a change – plan using stories because that is the teams currency

scrum gave us a framework for sprints – plan and commit on day 1, execute for 8 days, demo and retro on day 10

at enterprise level raise this to the PSI level – plan and commit at the program level and demo and retro together at the end, sprints at team level in between (a program is usually 5-10 teams)

do a one week all in training for the team and then fire straight into release planning – then coaching is in context – don’t have good experiences with teams that go ahead without coaching support

take into account that your first sprint will be a little rough

Enterprise systems require intentional architecture – it matters!

refactoring is part of agile, list on the wall and get the product owner to stand by them, but it doesn’t scale very well

architecture can emerge, you can’t always plan for it

principles of system architecture are important

the architect needs to be part of the team to succeed

the team owns the design of the system, gives them accountability – design spike is our currency for architecture and it needs to be demoed

Overall, there was nothing really new in this session for me, although it was great to hear from Dean directly, especially on the topic of PMO’s and leadership. His latest book is still on my list to read.

Removing Impediments with Drawings

Carlton Nettleton led this interactive session, the instructions and agenda of the session is available here.

A drawing is more memorable, particularly when related to a story, helps your audience visualize your message, pictures drawn by a human are better than those drawn by a computer because they look too perfect

This was a very hands on session, and the charts that we used in the exercises were very good templates that I will recall and use in future. The takeaway for me was to draw pictures in real time more to illustrate and get engagement for my message. I will also take another closer look at Dan Roam’s book.

in lean 99% of behaviors are driven by the system – people were driven by the situation at hand

focus on behaviors not values or judgements

Formula:

be specific on timeframes eg yesterday

your observed behavior

perceived impact

recommendation or suggested solution

make it a conversation – set aside time such as feedback frenzy Friday

give feedback earlier, not just at annual review time

create safety – “is now a good time”, not a public theme but in private

seek clarifications – apply the five why’s to feedback

say thanks for feedback at the end – appreciate being helped to grow

take action on the feedback

Overall I have always found Patrick’s writing on retrospectives helpful, however there was little new in the presentation for me.

After Dark

Wednesday night was the Sponsor Reception, where the prime aim was to get to every booth and get a sponsor stamp (the real rule was to get one stamp per page, but it was far more fun ensuring I visited every booth!) One of the amusing things in Salt Lake City was that they do not take themselves too seriously, as evidenced by this beer.

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Day 2 at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City kicked off with Todd Little advising that the conference this year had 1604 attendees from 43 countries and from 968 submissions we ended up with 268 sessions. Here are my notes.

Keynote – Why Care About Positive Emotions

Barbara Frederickson led with a keynote, but unfortunately I didn’t get to stick around for much of it as I needed to prepare for my session following. Two brief notes I picked up were:

positive psychology is about resilience, the closest concept in psychology to agile

positive emotions open us – we are more creative and can see more in the periphery, we have more resilience to bounce back, better performance on exams

The Speed To Cool: Agile Testing And Building Quality In

The session that I presented with Adrian Smith from Ennova was close to a full audience and was also one of a handful of sessions that was chosen to be recorded. We received lots of great feedback. The slides are available in a separate post. The following pictures were Adrian and I outside the room prior to the session:

context – need to not look at a whole object but how it fits into the whole system

patterns – in pair programming, the navigator can see patterns because they are not concerned with the symbols and syntax, pattern matching is the key to expertise

neuroplasticity – humans can grow new neurons, but not sitting in a cage or a cubicle, work with enlightened people or in a sensory rich environment you will grow new neurons, but if you don’t use parts of your brain it will get rewired

If you study in an artificial environment you will get artificial results.

novice – no experience, accomplish a goal, want to get it done, don’t know how respond to mistakes, only way to be effective is to have contact-free rules (ie working in a call centre, following a script), need recipes to follow, can’t get much productivity from this level

proficient – want to understand the big picture, want to understand why, frustrated by oversimplified information, self correct previous poor task performance (retrospectives are a good example of why they need an experienced coach), learn from previous experience, can understand and apply maxims

expert – primary source in their field, continually look for better methods, work from intuition, world does not really work on rules it works on experience

second order of incompetence – know what you don’t know and admit to it

nursing practice shares a lot of similarity to software development – you need to solve problems then and there – need to become outcomes-based, importance of the individual, keep experts in practice, pay based on value added to the company

South American monkey trap is like the tool trap – confuse model with reality, de-value traits that cannot be formalised, legislating behaviour that kills autonomy, alienated experienced practitioners, demand for conformity of tools, insensitivity to contextual nuances

brain is not a computer – made up of L mode and R mode and we switch between them – spinning girl exercise – creativity and intuition works better in R mode

image streaming – pose a problem to yourself, close your eyes for 10 minutes and then for each image that crosses your mind describe it out loud, image it with all five senses and describe it in the present tense

free form journalling – first thing in the morning, write three pages long hand, uncensored, don’t skip a day – way to get it out

we miss things that change slowly – this happens on projects on all the time

90 cognitive biases that people suffer – memory stinks – every read is a write that can create false memories, anchoring, fundamental attribution error, need for closure (agile estimation) – we will take any information even crap information for closure – in agile we want to keep things open ended, exposure effect, Hawthorne effect, relativity

set cues for task resumption when you get interrupted, leave a quick mote in code or on a notebook – gets back to resuming task much faster

set team interruption protocols – most teams say this is the happiest times they have coding

second monitor is a 20-30% productivity gains – ALT-TAB in windows is context switchin

Change is hard:

start with a plan

avoid inaction not errors

new habits take time (3-4 weeks)

belief is physical

take small next steps

This was a great session with so many techniques to look (and re-look at). As a result I think I will also add this book to my reading list (especially given that The Pragmatic Programmer in one of may favourite books). Finally, Andy reminded everybody that the Pragmatic Programmers also have a free magazine that is worth checking out.

After Dark

Tuesday night is typically the night that most of the vendor parties happen. I managed two invites – one to the Atlassian Drink-Up (which unfortunately due to talk preparation I ended up missing) and one to the Celebrate with Rally party which I was able to make for a couple of hours at the end.